


Nightmares

by Ealasaid



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, M/M, comfort/hurt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-31
Updated: 2012-01-31
Packaged: 2017-10-30 09:32:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/330280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ealasaid/pseuds/Ealasaid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Slick has been keeping up the entire hideout every night and Droog gets tired of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nightmares

It was pretty easy to tell when Slick started having nightmares. He had a tendency to stay up practicing his piano if he woke up from them, and for the past two weeks Droog had woken up at five in the morning to the sounds of a piano being massacred next door. When this usually happened he simply rolled over and buried his head under the pillow, but in the past week alone he’d gone from putting his head under a pillow to putting it under three pillows and then from three pillows to five, a stiff drink, and a set of earplugs.  
  
His patience finally snapped when he had not even been asleep for half an hour before the piano started up. It was clear that drastic measures would have to be taken if he wanted to get _any_ sleep that night, so he excavated himself from the pillows, extracted the ear plugs, threw on a pair of sleeping trousers, and stalked a little unsteadily to Slick’s room.  
  
He threw open the door to see Slick angrily pounding out a sonata on his set of ivories in the corner.  
  
“It hasn’t even been a half hour,” he snapped at his boss. “Just fucking go to sleep! What the hell is wrong with you?”  
  
Slick slammed his hands on the keyboard, bringing the butchered piece to a jangling end. “Fuck off,” he snarled back half hysterically, and Droog was startled to notice that it looked like Slick had been crying. “You don’t fucking know me, go sleep on the god damned couch if you can’t handle it you sack of _shit_ —”  
  
Droog took a deep breath, pinched the bridge of his nose, and tried his hardest to keep himself from leaping over the fucking piano and punching his boss as Slick went on, hysteria lending invective and incoherence to his ranting.  
  
“What will it take,” Droog gritted out when Slick took a breath. “What will it take to get you to shut the fuck up and go to sleep so that the _rest_ of us can get some ourselves?!”  
  
Slick screamed something at him and pulled out a handful of blades, tried beyond his extremely limited patience. Droog dodged hastily, but still acquired a couple of cuts that bled fiercely as he scrambled under the piano and came up right next to a cursing Slick, who pulled out a longer and nastier weapon and attempted to stab Droog.  
  
Droog caught him by the wrist and broke the hold easily. Slick could nail a butterfly at twenty feet blindfolded, but the two weeks with no sleep had left him with very little energy he could convert into real power, and he could not wriggle away as Droog wrestled the arm behind him and wrapped his free arm around Slick’s waist and hoisted him up, kicking and screaming, to the unmade bed.  
  
“Gerroff me!” Slick howled, and experienced a brief flight as Droog ignominiously tossed him onto the mattress. He managed to get to his knees and lunged at his lieutenant, but it was a mistake: Droog was ready. He punched Slick two inches below and to the left of Slick’s sternum. Slick froze, abruptly strangling his yelling to a weird noise like a lawnmower hitting a rock.  
  
Droog took the opportunity to shove him flat on the bed, and touched the spot again, gently tracing a line over it with a few fingers. Slick sucked a breath in with a whine. “Good,” Droog encouraged patiently, and stroked it again. Slick shuddered violently and abruptly relaxed bonelessly on the bed. He woozily managed to hiss “You said you wouldn’t do that!”  
  
Droog tsked at him and continued the action while Slick lost the ability to formulate verbal responses and ended up curling around Droog’s hand. Droog continued petting that peculiar spot on carapace abdomens that induced a heavy flow of endorphins. “I wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t been keeping me awake every night,” he replied mildly. Slick stirred a little, but didn’t make any effort to break away.  
  
Droog waited a minute more to make sure things had kicked in enough to risk stopping for a moment. He withdrew his hand and rolled Slick over a little more to make more room on the bed, and sat down, shoving some of Slick’s mangled pillows in between his back and the headboard before pulling the now-stirring smaller man closer and settling down to periodically petting his stomach.   
  
“So what have your nightmares been about?” he inquired after a decent amount of time had passed. Slick made an “mmming” noise; he was half asleep already.  
  
“No...thing,” he said softly. “‘S nothin’. ‘s stupid.”  
  
“Liar.” Slick didn’t respond to that.  
  
Droog waited a little more, and asked, “Is it about Derse?”  
  
Slick mumbled “I dunno.”  
  
“No?”  
  
Slick wriggled a little, but Droog picked up the pace and he relaxed again.   
  
“I dunno,” he repeated lowly. “Can’t remember when I wake up, but if I go back to sleep I wind up in th’ middle of it again.”  
  
Droog let the silence fall again, still petting, and that plus the lack of sleep he’d been getting set him dozing off propped up against the headboard. Slick was already asleep, forcefully calmed into oblivion.  
  
Some murky time later Droog was jerked awake by a frantic whimper. Slick had rolled away and twisted himself up in the bed linens and was scrabbling against the mattress with a free hand. Droog checked—Slick wasn’t awake, just being terrified whatever nightmares had been coming regularly. He was also crying again.  
  
Hastily, Droog rolled over fighting disorientation and slung an arm around his desperate boss, who struggled against the hold with exponentially more hysteria. “Sshhhhhhh,” he said softly, yanking at the choking sheets Slick had gotten tangled in and finding the spot again. “Shhhhh, Jack, it’s okay.”  
  
Slick jerked awake with a desperate sound at the name, shaking. “Droog,” he gasped, and frantically groped for his friend.  
  
“Yeah, I’m here.” Droog dragged him across the bed and wrapped him in what could only be called a hug, keeping one hand on the trigger spot. “I’m here.” He shushed his shaking boss and soothingly kept up the petting until they both fell asleep again.   
  
In the afternoon the next day (they slept until around two, having no business to occupy their time) neither referred to the incident. But the following night Droog slept with Slick, and the piano went unused.

**Author's Note:**

> Someone on tumblr had a headcanon about mythical "purr" spots for carapaces, with like, cat-purr inducing qualities comparable to rubbing their tummies. I thought it was adorable.


End file.
